Dev Update #2 The 2020 Platform
A lot of people have been asking us exactly when we will be rolling out our platform and what will it feature. We've kept tight lipped on the platform thus far whilst working away on it and through a busy preseason of content. It's extremely difficult to estimate how long software development will take and as we found out last year its actually rather complicated building a fantasy rugby platform. After a long discussion with our gun software engineer we want to give a bit more clarity on our plans for 2020 and in the words of William Wairua, be "O & T" (open & transparent) in communicating what's going on over at Draft Rugby HQ.
There is a lot to look forward to but lets start with the bad news. Our platform was almost there for the 2019 season but we simply ran out of time and knowhow building it ourselves! A year has gone by and we are again finding ourselves running out of time but definitely now with the knowhow and the resolve. We enjoyed the Super Rugby off season, spent a few weeks over in Japan for the rugby world cup (how good was that?) and late last year fully committed to making this dream fantasy rugby platform of ours a reality.
So what have we done so far?
We've completed the comprehensive designs for our platform, formed a strategy, a budget and we set about finding a software engineer to build it out. It took us a while but we were incredibly lucky to come across the hero we desperately needed, the hero draft rugby deserved in our smoking gun of a software engineer, @hugh_jeremy. Ultimately Hugh has been rebuilding the platform from the ground up over the last month to ensure it works at extremely high speed and with the ability to add features fast. Hugh will no doubt post a dev blog with some more technical details and is excited to answer your questions. Now we all wish we found Hugh a few months earlier but to be honest we are just so stoked and fortunate to have an engineer of his calibre on board and he's a complete one man band. At this stage it doesn't look like we will have a fully functional platform for the start of the 2020 Super Rugby season but it won't be very long until we do and we will have a number of exciting releases this season.
What's to come?
Hugh has been working largely on the back end to date, building out the higher order infrastructure (what was missing last year) which has all been completed and we love what we are seeing. This is the plan for releasing features this season.
Stats - Our first release will be our comprehensive stats page and system. The basic free stats that will be similar to what we have had up on the site in 2019 only better, and we will also be offering premium user stats. This will be hands down the best fantasy rugby stats page on the market. We intend to release all our player data in a well designed page where you can search players, sort by individual season stats, track important fantasy point indicators like points per minute, form, value of next pick etc... We have so much planned for this section of the page and we can not wait to open it up asap - more on this to come in following posts!
LEAGUE MANAGEMENT - We know that like us, most of our users/supporters run their own offline leagues and we intend to unlock features quickly throughout the season to help you manage your leagues before we can be your everything!! First you'll be able to sign up, create leagues, invite your friends, add & track your teams and league scores, then once its ready we will release trades and drafting. To start the season we want you to think of us as your extremely high tech, personal, automated spreadsheet. We anticipate that you will no longer need your clunky laborious offline leagues very quickly.
NEW INTEGRATED BLOG. We've been running our fantasy super ruby blog on wordpress.com for 3 years now and we are integrating it into draftrugby.com. Who really cares? Well this will mean only one login for you to access the draftrugby.com platform and also to interact on our blog posts on wordpress. We think thats pretty cool! This also allows us to to step up our blog game using all the great customizations of wordpress.org as opposed to the old wordpress.com site. We are also planning for some more technical dev posts from Hugh and some guest writers in 2020.
In 2020 we are going to bring you into our world as we make the final jump to becoming your dream home of Fantasy Rugby. We are disappointed that it can't all be unveiled before the season kicks off, but we can assure you it will be so very worth waiting for! As we said in our first dev post of 2020 and failed to abide by, the plan is for smaller dev blog posts, more often! Now lets bring on the Rugby!
A word from our Software Engineer
Hi everyone, Harry, Nelson, and Cargie have intense passion for rugby. They have entrusted me to engineer the fantasy rugby platform of your dreams. I'm building on their brilliant prototype work, and creating a first-class platform from scratch. I joined the project a month ago. Since then, I've ripped into the hardest tasks first: Creating data-models, fantasy point calculation algorithms, and other intensely nerdy behind-the-scenes stuff. My mission now is to get you as many features as possible, as quickly as possible. I'm starting by creating an entirely new Player Stats interface, which will being you detailed fantasy stats for all players.You can ask me questions, yell at me about bugs, and request features on Twitter (@hugh_jeremy). Once I'm all set up, I'll be blogging here, too. I'll keep you up to date with all the gory technical development details.
Hugh